Page II: Microsoft's OS is in development, and Bob Muglia has little latitude for more slips.
Three years ago, Bill Gates told us that Sun Microsystems was your biggest competitor. How has that changed, given the agreement between you and Sun? Sun still pushes Linux pretty heavily.
Our arrangement with Sun is still very much evolving. We are talking about ways we can work together to benefit customers. In as much as Sun is doing Linux-based solutions, that's a different kind of competitor to us as well. Sun is in an interesting situation. All of the proprietary Unix vendors are in an interesting situation, as x86 becomes more ubiquitous. So Sun is in the middle of a huge transition.
Given your focus on finding new customers with future Windows Server releases, what areas are you targeting?
In the short run, the one that we are driving the most is the small-business space. We think that there is a huge opportunity there. I also look at the midsize-business segment. It has IT generalists. We are looking at how we can do things to help those people. And we think that we can continue to grow in the networking and database areas. Also, we are putting a lot of resources into areas where people want to migrate off of Unix.
Do those areas change with Longhorn?
The list stays pretty much the same. It will change over time, because nothing is static. I think we will do a better job with branch office use and high-performance computing, but basically, it's the same list.
Will a Longhorn client come out in 2006?
People are still figuring out exact timing for Longhorn client. It goes to beta in 2005. It's six to 12 months before Longhorn Server, so maybe that's 2005 or 2006. The client guys have not given an exact date. But we're being pretty clear that Longhorn Server is coming in the 2007 time frame.
Microsoft has had trouble getting some customers to move from older versions of Windows, like Windows NT 4.0, to Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, the latest server version. Where does that stand now?
In the last 12 months, about 35 percent of the base has moved to Windows 2000. It's accelerating. We will see in this calendar year another third of the base move. It's a pretty small percentage of customers on NT 4.0 -- less than 20 percent. Japan is higher than that. The United States is lower. But the vast majority of customers will move by the end of this year.
What percentage will take advantage of 64-bit versions of Windows Server?
A very high percentage. It depends on how fast the hardware ships. Any application with a high memory demand will see the advantage of 64-bit.
What about WinFS?
WinFS is in Longhorn server. Some of the functionality of WinFS and some of the scenarios of may be limited in terms of what it can do. We will use WinFS, clearly, for the shell in that environment. WinFS will be there for collaborative scenarios. But I don't know that we will have all of the scale to the level where we would like to have it, so that you could use it for very high-volume enterprise servers. So it could be that, for example, you could use WinFS as a server for collaboration in work groups. But if you want to support hundreds of users, that may wait for the update release. One of the great things about doing these releases on a regular basis is that every two years, there is an opportunity to improve things.
3%
5%
An opportunity to change things every two years, these guys are cutting edge !